Tag: mastermind

Importance of board games

Education experts say board games can accelerate a slew of skills that assist children to perform better in school. Playing them as a family boosts these benefits – and the fun. They satisfy the kids competitive urges and enhances the desire to master new concepts and skills like:

Number and shape recognition, counting and grouping

Reading and letter recognition

Color recognition and visual perception

Eye and hand coordination and manual dexterity

Research proves

In addition to these benefits, social scientists have found out that games teach lessons about familiarity with each other. For instance, board games may encourage children to:

Understand the concept of rules

Practice obedience of rules

Reason about social and moral problems

According to Gobet a social scientist, when kids play with older role models, they tend to learn new things such as winning strategies or how to lose – observing good manners. Many board games like chess and other board games encourage kids to:

Some board games are good for logical reasoning such as Clue, which can improve deductive logic. Games like Mastermind has been used to test aptitude levels for college students persuing coding and programming courses. Chess helps players to recognize and remember certain configurations of the chess pieces.

Board games that really benefit kids

Chess

According to Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli in a study about children with learning disabilities; kids who played chess as part of their learning schedule showed more improvement in math subjects. Here are other things you can learn from playing chess.

Number-Line board games

Another experiment done on some preschoolers showed an improvement in math for those who played Number-Line games. This is a game where players move pieces of the game through a line of sequentially numbered spaces.

Mastermind

Although experiments done for Mastermind game showed mixed results, some college students did report an improvement in their critical thinking skills. There is enough evidence that board game skills have resulted to improved academic skills.

Final take

Given that a successful game player has to master and learn how to control personal impulse, able to follow instructions, and reflect, it makes sense that board games might translate into better academic performances on subjects that require self-control and focus. It also makes sense that board games designed for children in a given learning subject, would highly enhance transferable skills.